How much initiative, in different moments of your career?

In what seems to be turning into a pattern, once more I am going to take this week's issue to further elaborate on a rough idea, on the best spirit of "thinking out loud" - which I do a lot - from a post in my LinkedIn page. For convenience and completeness here, this is what I wrote there:

Early in your career, showing initiative is a big thing to open up opportunities. At that point, you might have to do your part to pull work your way. It should go without saying, then to execute timely and on quality.

Later on, and assuming opportunities indeed opened, and you grabbed them, it becomes a different kind of game. You have to be much more strategic about the work you pull, the initiatives you take. That’s because there’s a whole bunch of work that will be “pulled” from you, needs from others that depend on you, and stuff like that.

Here’s a thing I would like to have told to my younger self. So that I wouldn’t feel compelled to take more and more onto myself, using the same trick that helped me grow at early stages of my career.

(For those concerned, I’m fine now, and for a while. Learned that lesson some time back already, through self-reflection).

In case you are a visual person like myself, or like to see schematized versions of things in general, here's how I would visualize that (obviously, don't worry to much on the sizes and proportions, this is conceptual sketch only):

First of all, a clarification might be due - I do take here the perspective of what has been my entire career context which is knowledge work. It might be a quite different matter if you work in a manual labor setting, or anything else where work is significantly more standardized day in day out.

The fundamental point here is that knowledge work is difficult to properly assess and measure effort needed early on, and unless you were in a truly toxic environment where tons of work gets pushed to you, there is a chance that you will get assigned less than you have capacity to handle. So you need to be smart about it, and "pull" more work to you, showing initiative and drive. I can tell you from my experience that it has worked out well, and the corollary was the opening of opportunities which I could grab and grow in my career.

Then I thought that maybe that was the trick, and kept going, always showing myself with lots of initiative. Until I realized that the nature of the game had changed, and by continuing portraying the same level of initiative I was putting myself into a conflict of time.

It was about the time I could fully internalize and get to grips with how much time and what you put your focus on is the ultimate resource you have. It has led me to try to be much more strategic on what I take on, when I show up with initiative and when I go more with the flow, as well as to the journey of becoming more of an essentialist.

And that is precisely what I would like to have told my younger self - how that nature of the game evolves through time and depending on the moment of your career.